User reviews

If you have a playful sense of humor and enjoy films with an early Fellini (celebration of life-quirky characters) flavor, you should make it a point to watch "Cousin Cousine". Released in 1975, on the surface this is just an off-beat love story about two middle-aged "cousins-by marriage" who are drawn to each other by a shared playfulness. These kindred spirits awaken in each other a zestful and irreverent attitude toward life that distances them from their large (and somewhat strange) extended family. They want to experience as much of life as possible, the man has made it a practice to change professions (not just jobs) every three years so that nothing gets stale. They are very open about their affair, reasoning that the rest of the family will think the worst anyway. Not surprisingly their affair also distances them from their respective spouses, who do not share their fun-loving and irreverent attitudes.

The lovers are played by Christine Barrault (nominated for an Oscar) and Victor Lanoux. Although they are fun and likable characters, most of the comedy in this film emanates from the performances of the actors who play their respective spouses. Guy Marchand plays Barrault's husband as a cranky and pathetic Cassanova whose philandering lifestyle is cramped by his inability to cope with his wife's sudden infidelity. Marie-France Pisier, as Lanoux's neurotic airhead wife, subtly steals each scene in which she appears; when a character introduces themselves with the revelation that the only time they have ever been happy was during hypnotherapy, you know that interesting moments are ahead. And for what it is worth Pisier is breathtakingly beautiful.

The affair causes the Marchand and Pisier characters a great deal of pain for most of the film, but by the end they have pretty much adjusted to everything. Marchand has resumed his pursue of other women and Pisier has returned to her main source of pleasure-therapy. Marchand's regeneration occurs with his first playful moment, he mounts a knife (fake) in his back and staggers into the living room to the shock of the assembled relatives. While Pisier's regeneration is the best scene of the film. Alone and fully clothed in the bathroom, she half-heartedly tries to slit her wrist with a razor blade and falls backward into the empty tub, which she unexpectedly finds a pleasant and relaxing place to think. And how appropriate since the bathtub is a device we associate with privacy, purgation, relaxation, openness, and regeneration.

They say that all films are political and "Cousin Cousine" is no exception. Films have the power to deconstruct the traditional values of society and this love story is also a social commentary on the hypocrisy and double-standards of 1970's western middle class culture. And while pointing out these issues it offers psycho-political messages that each viewer can relate to personally and specifically. The theme is that each day should be a celebration of life, experience, and growth.

The grandfather is shown as someone whose long life has given him a real perspective. He is pleased when his teenage granddaughter reveals that she has discovered sex and found it to be wonderful, delighted that she has found something see finds wonderful and amused because her joy is so contrary to the nihilism she had been embracing. He is self-sufficient, the widowed grandmother from the other side of the family enjoys being with him but realizes that he is perfectly comfortable and prefers living alone. He is disturbed by the failure of the family to take any significant time from their lives to mourn his brother's passing.

The strange antics of the adults in this extended family are a source of great amusement to the observant children. The carnival music score gives the many extended and flowing group shots a pleasing circus side-show attraction flavor.

Note how the film opens with one of families driving to the wedding; parents in the front seat, brother and little sister in the back seat. The parents are agitated and scolding, the children calm and attentive to the experience of the moment. They go out of the scene with the little sister sliding over to be closer to her brother and smiling in adoration. The same little observant girl appears in close-up periodically throughout the film, smiling in amusement at the antics of everyone around her. The film ends with the little girl smiling serenely out the window as she watches the lovers leave on their motorcycle.

"Cousin, Cousine" is certainly the most cheerful film where two marriages are being broken, maybe because it chose to deal with the exception rather than the norm, when the right romance comes after wedding vows, or maybe because writer Daniele Thompson foresaw that we would secretly cheer for those who refused to commit to dead-end relationships for commitment's sake or because they fear the avenging public eye. It's not the secrecy of the affair that provides the film's unique zest but its lack thereof.

And so Marthe (Marie-Christine Barrault) and Ludovic (Victor Lanoux) are both in their thirties (Ludovic closer to the forty mark) and meet at the point of their lives where a meaning is sought and heart commands to be filled with something that transcends family diktats, how ironic that it all starts in a family banquet. And never has infidelity been portrayed in such a light way, light as a something truly relieved from the burden of guilt and the necessity of concealing, although it is prevalent in the first weeks of the relationship, it is less as a hindrance than a way to preserve something occasional sunshine in rather cloudy lives.

And it's the tour de force of director Jean-Charles Tacchela to tackle the relationship in such a way that we never feel inclined to condemn the sight of a man having an affair, indulging in a pastry binge-eating, humming a classical piece of music or going swimming, not skin-dipping like in usual romances, but in the local swimming pool as to already taint their relationship with social visibility. Even their children don't disapprove their relationships, the opening wedding sequence having already established them as fully aware of the adults' little misbehaviors (after all, everyone's part of the same hypocrisy).

And while the leading couple floats on a cloud of tenderness, most of the laughs are provided by Marthe's cheating husband Pascal (Guy Marchand) and Ludovic's neurotic sleep-cure addict girlfriend Karine (Marie-France Pisier). Pascal is a delusional macho lover who, after a long sequence where he dumped his mistresses one by one, he comes home triumphantly waiting for Marthe to applaud his redemption, she doesn't even dignify it with a smile. As a more complex character, it's the pert, hippie-like and neurotic Karine who steals the show with such gusto that she could have been a full Woody Allen character, Pisier is so hilarious she'd make you forget how beautiful she is in a young Adjani way. Now, there are moments where subtlety deserts the story but not so long that it is distracting... and just when you think the film borders into darker territories, you realize it's only setting you up for a big laugh. "Cousin, Cousine" tactfully spares us the whole drama and one scene involving a suicide attempt had the kind of predictable outcomes that can only be considered comical genius.

Now, would the liaison have been more acceptable had the two been happy or their partners not be unfaithful in the first place? In the first case, it wouldn't have made much sense, in the second the director finds a little pirouette by making them meet before they understand what Pascal and Karine were up too. The romance wasn't premeditated and we believe it because their lines of dialogues flow so naturally with the casual frivolity we carefully insert in our many flirtations with strangers, for the kicks, especially in these screen-less times where nothing could be recorded (some kids were still sneaky enough to take play paparazzi on you). Lanoux plays Ludovic with the quiet charisma of the man who doesn't weigh everything he says and embraces his contradiction, he criticizes family reunions but admits he enjoys them, he doesn't value his job and says he needs to change one every three years, his volatile life speaks less about himself than his total honesty about it.

And there's something so graceful in Barrault's performance, in the way she literally gives herself to Ludovic, that makes for a compelling performance full of little touches such as a smile or a maternal desire to clip his toenails, Barrault would be nominated for Best Actress the same year than "Rocky". And in a way, the couple reminded me of that quote from about Rocky and Adrian: "she's got gaps, I've got gaps, together, we fill gaps". What gaps could they possibly have? Well, the film is not interested in delving into them, what it does however is present them as two members of an ordinary family gathering for the usual occasions: wedding banquets, funerals, Christmas parties, where as usual in France, it's all about drinking, having fun and partying, things so common that one can only welcome whatever will break that routine. And "Cousin, Cousine" provides a very sociological slice of French bourgeois life in the 70s in a time where divorces and mixed families were uncommon but not rarities.

Long story short, what "Cousin Cousin" accomplishes is to make you believe in a love story where it's not about sex or lust, it's not about petty vengeance, just about mutual attraction and two people sharing common pleasure in togetherness... the whole thing enrobed with a gallery of sympathetic characters who have all in common that they will all remind us of someone we know. And watching Marthe and Ludovic together, no matter how disapproving we are, we can't blame them from living their romance to the fullest and when they take a hotel room for an afternoon and then it turns into a night, it doesn't just feel real, it feels exhilarating. The greatest delights come from their shamelessness and how disconcerting it is for their entourage.

And the final shot is just like "The Graduate" except this time with grown-ups who know (and we know) they've made the right choice, the puzzlement of the family behind the doors might show disbelief but maybe a secret envy...

Two adult cousins go well beyond the kissing stage in this lighthearted French comedy, a popular choice for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, thanks in large part to its casually forthright attitude toward the joys of physical affection. The two lovers, each already married, are blithely unconcerned with the opinions of others, taking an altogether healthy pleasure in scandalizing their extended (bourgeois) family by retiring to the bedroom for hours on end during holiday reunions, and so forth. A surplus of natural charm, combined with a refreshing (and typically French) lack of romantic melodrama, make it an easy film to enjoy, and an unsurprising candidate for the inevitable glossy Hollywood remake, fourteen years later.

"Cousin Cousine" had a huge popular success in the United States (as probably everywhere else) when it was released in the 1970s. It is nothing more than a love story about a middle-aged man and woman who are estranged from their respective spouses. They openly profess and privately consummate their love, everybody be damned. The movie's value lies in its anarchic and refreshingly droll (drôle?) spirit. The lovers are the lovely Christine Barrault and her cousin by marriage, Victor Lanoux. They win our sympathy because they are such a delightful contrast to the sham and self-pity of their respective mates, Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier. Marchand is an especially hilarious cranky type. Jean-Charles Tacchella directed this bubbly and, yes, "gallic" comedy with wit and sensitivity, and you can't help enjoying it immensely. So all this makes adultery OK? Well, we at least are supposed to think that. The movie was remade in 1989 as "Cousins" with Isabella Rossellini and Ted Danson in the two leading roles.

I saw this in high school when it first came out.

It is very charming and sweet.

It was one of the first foreign languages I saw with subtitles. Since then I have been a strong follower of foreign films.

It is interesting that there are some strongly negative responses in the other comments, that such a gentle sweet film can register such strong responses.

I look at it as a bit of a fantasy ... that it is not there to really ask us to work out the nitty gritty of what happens to children or the other relationships. It sorta says ... how would you be in this situation? Anyway .. a very nice foreign film.

French cinema is perhaps the only cinema in the world where a man can cheat on a stunning woman like Marie-France Pisier and it looks fairly "normal" and believable. "Cousin, Cousine" does not break much new ground thematically, but it does have plenty of charm and wit, as well as a wonderful cast (especially the two leads, Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux). It is also pointed in its observations about male hypocrisy and double-standards, probably the contribution of female co-screenwriter Daniele Thompson. Nominated for several Oscars, this dramedy belongs in the same period of popular French films as "La Cage Aux Folles", although it is considerably more low-key. *** out of 4.

Cousin, Cousine directed by Jean Charles Tacchella was probably the first French movie I ever watched, at least in French with English subtitles. I was in my first year of college French at Indiana University and this movie was suggested by my teacher, a very enthusiastic grad student and mentor to all of his students. At that time the Midwest was my birthright and I had rarely traveled outside its familiar confines. I knew that I wanted to get away from where I had lived almost my entire life up until then, but I didn't know how to do it or know where to go. I was studying French mostly because it was a required part of an undergraduate degree. I suppose that I just saw it as another course, like economics or history. After watching this movie at an off-campus art house movie theater, I couldn't help but think that the French were very different from the people I knew. At that time, as far as I was concerned, "different" was the same as "good." I immediately developed an overly-romantic view of France that I hold to this day. Cousin, Cousine also gave me an overly-romantic view of love that I have maintained to this day.

I just watched this movie again recently, a film that was made in 1975 yet holds up extremely well, both as a timeless work of art and as something capable of speaking directly to me. In some ways I think that I haven't changed a single bit over the course of what has been my adult life. I still think this movie is just about the sexiest thing ever put on film, a story about two people who become best friends before consciously and deliberately deciding to be lovers.

I don't even know where to begin as far as my praise for this beautiful film. I love everything about it, even the music remains wonderfully whimsical—a lot of movie scores from the 70s are woefully dated. Cousin, Cousine has soured me on a generation of American films that don't have the slightest clue about how to portray ordinary people. The central characters are a handsome couple but not movie star perfect. They haven't been air-brushed, surgically enhanced, and stair-mastered to within an inch of their lives. All of the characters in this movie have ordinary (if not dumb) jobs. Hollywood's idea of a normal person's job is an advertising executive, and forget about accurately portraying all of the other details of middle class life. I think it was this movie that started my prejudice for books and movies about ordinary people, people I can recognize from my own very ordinary life.

If you haven't seen Cousin, Cousine I think you should give it a look, if you can find it. It should only take about the first 15 minutes or so to turn you into a Francophile.

This popular French comedy deservedly received a lot of international acclaim and awards on its original release and still pleases when watched today almost 40 years later; apart from the Cesars and the Golden Globes, the film received 3 Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film (which it lost to Ivory Coast's BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR – which I also caught up with just now), Best Actress (Marie-Christine Barrault losing out to NETWORK's Faye Dunaway) and Best Original Screenplay (again won by NETWORK). Interestingly enough, in both the Actress and Screenplay categories, there were two foreign nominees apiece: Barrault and Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's FACE TO FACE and, for Screenplay, Lina Wertmuller's SEVEN BEAUTIES and, incidentally, both directors made the cut among the final 5 nominees for Best Direction!

Barrault and her female co-star Marie-France Pisier (a Cesar winner herself here and, for my money, more deserving of an Oscar nod than the latter) are the only familiar names in a sympathetic cast; even director Tacchella seems to have been a one-hit wonder. Bafflingly, COUSIN COUSINE had been 'announced' as an upcoming Criterion title since the earliest days of DVD (in fact, the copy I watched culled from a US TV screening sports the tell-tale "Janus Film" header before the film's opening credits) but this release never came to pass! For what it is worth, this is one of the earliest examples of a Gallic success being revamped for Hollywood consumption, when it was remade by Joel Schumacher as COUSINS (1989) with Ted Danson, Isabella Rossellini and Sean Young.

In any case, the plot line is simple enough: an extended family is reunited for two weddings and a funeral (anticipating the popular 1994 British farce FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL by 20 years!) and a series of infidelities come to the fore between two particular couples. Barrault's chronically womanizing husband (Guy Marchand) had been cheating on her with (among many others) the vulnerable Pisier, whose own restless spouse (Victor Lanoux) starts an initially secretly platonic but subsequently openly passionate affair with Barrault. There are several memorably delightful episodes which add to the charm of the film: during the wedding reception of Barrault's mother, the groom proposes to sing but when vetoed, proceeds to indulge in "mooning" (baring his buttocks in public); when Marchand decides after the opening wedding ceremony to mend his philandering ways, he is shown running from one flame to the next to end their relationship...ultimately being thrown off a bus by the burly female driver!; at the second marriage, Marchand again keeps getting into fisticuffs with the bridegroom's father, a former business partner who had defrauded him, etc. The whole is set to a jaunty musical accompaniment courtesy of yet another obscure element, one Gerard Anfosso.

I seem to recall seeing an American version of this French film about about a woman in her early 30s meeting the nephew of her mother's new husband at her mother's wedding. The French version is able in just 96 minutes to capture the quirky personalities in all three generations as the extended family gathers again at another wedding, a funeral and a children's party. In the moments in between the gatherings, the two cousins get to know each other very well.

It is a total mystery why I chose to see this film on the stroke of midnight bringing in 2024. I have had it for years, and it was certainly not what I hoped to see, but with such plaudits in France and America in the long ago of the mid-Seventies I was curious. Within minutes I found it unbearable; an excruciatingly unfunny film which has as its beginning a ' typical ' French wedding. As farce it was lame, the climax of it being a man showing his naked behind to much laughter. No spoilers although it seems everyone knows two distant cousins have what was called back then a ' freedom ' free platonic and then a full on sexual relationship. This relationship grips the film with too many scenes, and in my opinion Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux give lack lustre performances. Their respective spouses are more or less side lined, and Marie-France Pisier ( the best actor in the film ) who is one of them briefly lights up the film. The soundtrack music is in my opinion appalling but typical of mediocre French films of its time. In fact I found the film vulgar and shoddily made, and regretted that I had not chosen Eric Rohmer. How mysterious are our choices!!

If the movie had just been about a man and a woman having an affair after their partners first had an affair, this might have been a good movie. The first unfaithful pair consisted of a guy who was a serial adulterer who should have needed a case of Viagra just to keep up with his many affairs and the lady was a self-involved neurotic. SO, when THEIR spouses get together and build a friendship and then eventually sleep together, you have some sympathy for them. BUT, what about the children? They both have kids (and one of them is pretty young), but all they are concerned about is their infatuation and getting back at their unfaithful spouses. While this might have been accepted by audiences when the film was released, I just felt this was ugly and selfish. They could have divorced their slimy spouses, but neither showed any regard for the innocent kids. The film is well-made but way too self-centered to have any positive lasting message.

Pleasant romantic comedy about French social mores with Barrault and Lanoux starring as cousins - by marriage - who first become friends who eventually fall in love. They finally have an affair, flaunting it beautifully to their entire family. Some early development of farce, but not taken far enough, although there is a wonderful funeral sequence where everyone seems preoccupied with other things, rather than a deceased member of the family. (Pascal incessantly looking at his watch; the children assuming the funeral is another party.)Great performances from Barrault and Lanoux highlight the fun. Barrault and the film were Oscar nominated in 1975.

Infamously about two "cousins" who engage with an affair after a chance meetup during their true cousins' wedding after their partners are also equally having affairs.

I think the best descriptor here is this feels light and carefree. No one really was going the distance to hide their affairs AND much of the drama that happened in this film are mostly about the other problems of their spouses irrelevant to the affair. It's not really shocking when the film ended that way lol.

Though, I do not see why or how this was acclaimed. It such light fluff with a generic premise (but interesting handle on the subject). I guess something is loss when our sensibilities also had moved further of the time. I think maybe it was a new outlook then BUT time had tamed the text so much that something is lost for viewers like me. It does not help that the themes tackled were not particularly pointed.

Performance wise, it tends to its material. They charmed it up indeed but none of the actors where particularly noteworthy. The direction is standard of the time.

Not recommended.

This movie was great. It was shown on Bravo cable channel here in America. I was a little buzzed from a night out and came back and found this flic on.

I got it right at the beginning and was taken by the charming chemistry between the two cousins and the very sly and low-key nature of the relationship. That was a great part of the appeal of the movie for me. I also liked the two lead performances. Both were quite quietly confident and did not feel the need to throw themselves at the viewer in order to be seen.

I enjoyed the fact that they thought about how best to get a rise out of their significant others. Well, I thought that was interesting and it showed two thoughtful people considering how best to achieve their goal and not totally consumed by lust. The reactions of the two effected spouses were very funny too. The two who were in the affair were very funny as they tried to contrive more and more ways to get back at their spouses. It was very interesting and not as glossed over as Hollywood films in which it takes the two cheating partners about 17.23 seconds to jump in the sack together. This movie played itself out and one could see how they moved from a platonic to a full relationship.